Tag: WWW Wednesday

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

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Currently reading

Songbirds by Christy Lefteri (review copy, courtesy of Manilla Press and Readers First)

Nisha has crossed oceans to give her child a future. By day she cares for Petra’s daughter; at night she mothers her own little girl by the light of a phone.

Nisha’s lover, Yiannis, is a poacher, hunting the tiny songbirds on their way to Africa each winter. His dreams of a new life, and of marrying Nisha, are shattered when she vanishes.

No one cares about the disappearance of a domestic worker, except Petra and Yiannis. As they set out to search for her, they realise how little they know about Nisha. What they uncover will change them all.

For Lord & Land (The Bernicia Chronicles #8) by Matthew Harffy (eARC, courtesy of Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

AD 647 Anglo-Saxon Britain. Greed and ambition threaten to tear the north apart. War rages between the two kingdoms of Northumbria. Kin is pitted against kin and friend becomes foe as ambitious kings vie for supremacy.

When Beobrand travels south into East Angeln to rescue a friend, he unwittingly tilts the balance of power in the north, setting in motion events that will lead to a climactic confrontation between Oswiu of Bernicia and Oswine of Deira. While the lord of Ubbanford is entangled in the clash of kings, his most trusted warrior, Cynan, finds himself on his own quest, called to the aid of someone he thought never to see again. Riding into the mountainous region of Rheged, Cynan faces implacable enemies who would do anything to further their own ends. Forced to confront their pasts, and with death and betrayal at every turn, both Beobrand and Cynan have their loyalties tested to breaking point. Who will survive the battle for a united Northumbria, and who will pay the ultimate price for lord and land?

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Recently finished

Links from the titles will take you to my review.

This Shining Life by Harriet Kline 

Business As Usual by Jane Oliver & Ann Stafford

Those I Have Lost by Sharon Maas

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

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What Cathy (will) Read Next

The Book of Echoes by Rosanna Amaka (ebook, courtesy of Doubleday and Random Things Tours)  

While giving thanks at a shrine in Africa over two hundred years ago, a young woman tosses her infant son to safety moments before she is hauled away by slavers. After a brutal sea passage, her baby girl is snatched steaming from her loins as she gives birth. Although she doesn’t know it yet, her spirit is destined to roam the earth in search of her lost children.

She will make her way to England where Michael is trying to stay out of trouble as riots spit and boil down the streets of South London, and all the way to a sun-baked village in Nigeria, where a servant girl named Ngozi struggles to escape her low-caste status. As the invisible threads that draw her to these lives are pulled ever tighter, The Book of Echoes asks: how can we overcome the traumas of the past when they are woven, so inextricably, with the present? 

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

---

Currently reading

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende (audiobook)

In the late 1930s, civil war gripped Spain. When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border. Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life irreversibly intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love.

In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them wants, and together are sponsored by poet Pablo Neruda to embark on the SS Winnipeg along with 2,200 other refugees in search of a new life. As unlikely partners, they embrace exile and emigrate to Chile as the rest of Europe erupts in World War.

Starting over on a new continent, their trials are just beginning. Over the course of their lives, they will face test after test. But they will also find joy as they wait patiently for a day when they are exiles no more, and will find friends in the most unlikely of places. Through it all, it is that hope of being reunited with their home that keeps them going. And in the end, they will find that home might have been closer than they thought all along.

This Shining Life by Harriet Kline (eARC, courtesy of Transworld Books)

For Rich, life is golden. He fizzes with happiness and love. But Rich has an incurable brain tumour.

When Rich dies, he leaves behind a family without a father, a husband, a son and a best friend. His wife, Ruth, can’t imagine living without him and finds herself faced with a grief she’s not sure she can find her way through.
At the same time, their young son Ollie becomes intent on working out the meaning of life. Because everything happens for a reason. Doesn’t it?

But when they discover a mismatched collection of presents left by Rich for his loved ones, it provides a puzzle for them to solve, one that will help Ruth navigate her sorrow and help Ollie come to terms with what’s happened. Together, they will learn to lay the ghosts of the past to rest, and treasure the true gift that Rich has left them: the ability to embrace life and love every moment.

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Recently finished

Links from the titles will take you to my review.

The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories edited by Margaret Jull Costa

The Secret Keeper of Jaipur (The Henna Artist #2) by Alka Joshi

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What Cathy (will) Read Next

Business As Usual by Jane Oliver & Ann Stafford  

Hilary Fane is an Edinburgh girl fresh out of university who is determined to support herself by her own earnings in London for a year, despite the mutterings of her surgeon fiancé. After a nervous beginning looking for a job while her savings rapidly diminish, she finds work as a typist in the London department store of Everyman’s (a very thin disguise for Selfridges), and rises rapidly through the ranks to work in the library, where she has to enforce modernizing systems on her entrenched and frosty colleagues.

Business as Usual is charming, intelligent, heart-warming, funny, and entertaining. It’s deeply interesting as a record of the history of shopping in the 1930s, and fascinating for its unflinching descriptions of social conditions, poverty and illegitimacy.